WordPress is increasingly widely used by Liberal Democrats, whether it is to run websites or blogs. One of WordPress’s strengths is the huge range of plugins available. The party has made a small number of Liberal Democrat specific plugins available too (see www.libdems.org.uk/tools), however there is scope for many more.

Hence this official party competition:

1. The competition will run until 29 February.
2. You can submit as many WordPress plugins as you wish.
3. They must all be original, and not have been published previously.
4. A prize of £200 will be paid to the plugin which, in the views of the judges, is most helpful for someone running a Liberal Democrat website or blog. This might be adding a Liberal Democrat specific feature (e.g. integration with one of the party’s online tools) or it might be providing a more general feature that is also of use to Liberal Democrats. Easy of use and quality of documentation will be taken into consideration.
5. To submit a plugin to the competition email [email protected] with the subject line “Plugin competition”.
6. All plugins will be made available as open source software, and you must ensure that any plugin submitted does not contain any material which would prohibit this.
7. The competition is open to anyone except federal party employees or their families.
8. Any queries about the competition should be sent to [email protected]
9. The judges will be Mark Pack and Will Howells and their decision will be final.

If you are stuck for ideas on plugins to produce, here are some examples that have cropped up in people’s wish lists – though you don’t have to submit something from this list:

• A plugin to run online STV polls.
• A plugin to allow easy insertion of petitions from the party’s online petition tool (http://ourcampaign.org.uk) into a website or blog
• A plugin similar to KBLinker but which pulls from a central list of MPs’ (and others) names and web addresses so that people don’t have to maintain their own list.